Still an iconic figure in her later years, Joan Baez was key to the folk music
boom of the early 1960s when she and Bob Dylan ignited the era of protest song
and she gained the nickname the queen of folk. The daughter of a Mexican
physician raised in a Quaker family who lived all over the world (and spent part
of her childhood in Iraq), Joan Baez developed a keen interest in civil rights.
Her first instrument was a ukulele but a Pete Seeger concert triggered her
interest in folk music and she started singing in clubs and coffee houses on the
college circuit in the Boston/Cambridg...